


It All Started with Embalmed Cucumbers

by TheOceanIsMyInkwell



Series: A Little Unsteady [13]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Anxious Tony Stark, Gen, Humor, Hurt Peter Parker, Hurt/Comfort, Precious Peter Parker, Whump, honestly the amount of quips in this is kinda criminal for a bullet scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 09:54:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22968043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOceanIsMyInkwell/pseuds/TheOceanIsMyInkwell
Summary: "Right, uh, sooo, it started with the pickles and I am not to blame for that, for the record it was Ned, but, uh--"Tony sniffs out the signature Parker stutter of guilt in a second flat. He scoops up his phone from the couch and squints at it. "What gives, webhead? Spit it out.""Oh, no," Peter says. "Oh God.""I've been called that, yes.""You're not the answering machine.""That is correct, Mr. Four-Point-Oh.""I--I was not prepared for the consequences of live interaction," Peter says faintly.--Peter was bound to get shot at some point. It being on a Saturday afternoon all because of some long-winded story about pickles that he fails to explain is just the cherry on top. Cue Rhodey coming to the rescue to dig the bullet out and Tony having none of the kid's nervous wisecracks, thank you very much.
Relationships: James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Series: A Little Unsteady [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1041275
Comments: 70
Kudos: 539





	It All Started with Embalmed Cucumbers

**Author's Note:**

> Give it up for me delivering on my many promises to write the Peter Gets a Bullet in His Leg and Rhodey Digs It Out While Tony Panics oneshot after two. Freaking. Years. This series resurrects from the dust, halle-yeeting-lujah.
> 
> This was written on my phone past midnight on 11% battery and a period-induced fever, so apologies if it's a bit mediocre. I had fun producing it because I'm trash. :)

Tony picks up on the second and a half ring, because it's a Saturday and the kid is usually vegging in his biffle's place and doing whatever it is modern nerds do as a pastime these days, so there's objectively no need to worry. And while Tony is in the business of snooping in the archno-teen's more gymnastically inclined activities, he is not in the business of making his helicopter parent--mentor--influencer?--tendencies known.

So who could blame him for feeling up to a prank or two today?

"Yeah, you've reached Stark, and if you've gotten this far without my forehead of security screening your call then you're probably somebody I'm supposed to be talking to. Congratulations. Leave your message after the beep, though I'm probably never calling you back."

"Right, uh, sooo, it started with the pickles and I am not to blame for that, for the record it was Ned, but, uh--"

Tony sniffs out the signature Parker stutter of guilt in a second flat. He scoops up his phone from the couch and squints at it. "What gives, webhead? Spit it out."

"Oh, no," Peter says. "Oh God."

"I've been called that, yes."

"You're not the answering machine."

"That is correct, Mr. Four-Point-Oh."

"I--I was not prepared for the consequences of live interaction," Peter says faintly.

He's definitely sounding more breathless by the minute.

"So?" Tony prompts him. "What'd you do, cut your hand on a jar of pickles?" Despite his outward levity, Tony's throat has already tightened infinitesimally. Damn his preternatural sense for danger, also known as anxiety.

"Well," Peter huffs out slowly. A puff of breath, then another. The line crackles. "Um. Well. There's kind of a... hole? In my leg. So. Yeah. There's that."

Tony used to scoff at narrators who always described their characters' blood draining from their face, but now he finally understands how he could feel like a vampire just sucked him dry.

"Christ on a fifteen-speed bicycle."

"Oops?" says Peter.

Tony needs no further prompting. He tosses the phone into the cushions, slashes the air with a practiced movement and thrusts out his arms for the pieces of armor that come flying at him around the corner of the living room. FRIDAY transfers the call seamlessly to his HUD and now he can hear every strain in Peter's lungs in horrifying high definition.

"I swear it actually wasn't the jar of pickles, 'cause, like, honestly that would _absurd_ if I let a bunch of, of embalmed _cucumbers_ stab me somehow and like, that would mean that I definitely need to look for a new hobby. 'Cause you know, Mr. Stark--"

"Context later, location now," Tony snaps. He's already jetting to the roof and blasting off in a roar of thrusters and smoke and concrete.

As Peter rattles off the landmarks, Tony glimpses Karen's GPS system flickering to life in the lower left corner of his display. Great. Whatever it is that hit Peter must have compromised the wiring in the suit.

"Put pressure on the wound," Tony says tersely. "Grab anything you can find that's long and not stretchy. Can you bandage yourself up?"

"Uh," Peter stalls. "About that."

The man barely holds back a curse. "If the knife is in the wound, _keep it there_."

"Mr. Stark? This is more of a, more of a...bullet kinda situation?"

"God _damn_ it." Tony wobbles in the sky as he blinks and struggles to catch his breath. Fuck the wiring and fuck the damage to the suit, honestly. Somebody just had the pure audacity to put a fucking _bullet_ in his kid.

Peter's voiceless little huffs on the other end of the line pitch up into a tiny whine, and Tony thinks he's quite possibly going into the Guinness Book of World Records for first man to have a heart attack while trapped in a titanium alloy suit hurtling at one hundred ninety miles per hour through the New York skyline.

"Just press on it if you can," Tony manages to choke out. "My ETA is three minutes, kid. I'll be there before you know it. C'mon, keep it together for me, that's it, don't check out just yet. Look alive. God damn it. Goddammit. I need you alive so I can personally skin you when all this is through."

The wateriness of Peter's weak little laugh in reply is hardly reassuring. "No, Mr. Stark," he slurs. "Need all the--th' skin I can get. To patch. Patch the hole."

The man indulges in a few more choice swears. He pushes the thrusters to their limit, ignoring the hum of FRIDAY's warnings in his ear and the blinking of his speed updates in the corner of his screen.

"I'm coming for ya," he mutters desperately. "I'm coming, Spidey. Keep breathing for me. I swear to God on the life of Peggy Carter herself, I will personally straitjacket you in your own web when I'm done with you."

\--

Any of Peter's valiant attempts to insist on walking his way to the Med Bay are tossed out the window when he sets foot on the roof. Tony takes one look at the frightening whiteness that washes over the boy's face and lunges forward to catch him by the armpits from behind before Peter can crumple to the concrete.

"Easy, easy, easy," Tony whispers. "Up you go. No excuses. I'm carrying you."

The mere fact that Peter is silent in reply and his lips are growing increasingly pale is a testament to the pain that must be shooting through his thigh from the bullet wound. And at some point he must have either dissociated or blacked out, because the next thing he knows he's lying back on a crinkle of paper and vinyl gurney and the blurry outline of Rhodey's head is blocking out the halogen light in his field of vision.

"It looks worse than it actually is," Rhodey says briskly. His voice is warped, distant, as if a bubble has suddenly encased Peter's head.

Tony grits his teeth and paces. "He's lost a lot of blood."

"And it's healing," Rhodey points out. "Which would be the perfect scenario, except there's clearly a bullet lodged in there. There's no exit point."

Tony knows this. He knew this. Christ, he saw it with his own two eyes the moment he alighted on the asphalt and stumbled over to the boy slumped there all streaked with crimson.

"I'll stick him with the anesthetics and hope for the best," Rhodey goes on, already reading his best friend's mind for him. It goes without saying that the look of sheer panic that passes between them is a silent acknowledgement that no freaking anesthetics in the world so far have worked on Peter.

Tony's answering smile is tight and mangled. "I hope you've been going to church on Sundays, Jimmy, 'cause my tab with the man upstairs is pretty full."

Strange words uttered in an even stranger voice, but for the both of them it's enough to count as a quiet _I trust you_.

"Mr. Stark?"

The man's head jerks in the boy's direction at the plaintive note of his voice. In a flash he's there, knees bent to crouch by the kid's head, and he plasters on the bravest and hardest smile he can muster. "Yeah, Underoos?"

"Not a--y'know." Peter gestures sloppily in the air. "Not a fan of needles."

"It's okay, it's just a prick and then you won't feel a thing," Tony rushes to reassure him.

"I'd, I, I'd really rather not," says the kid, and his mentor thinks he sounds pretty close to puking from fear. Remarkably, Peter's eyes are dry.

"It won't work," Peter speaks again when Tony doesn't reply at first. "Please? Mr. Stark--just--just have Mr. Rhodey dig it out. It's gonna be okay. Everything's gonna be fine."

Tony chokes on the flavor of his own panic racing like centipedes up his throat. The irony of Peter's own words is not lost on him.

"Okay," Tony croaks out. It's the loudest his lungs will allow him to speak now. "All right. Okay. Shit. Rhodey, you heard him."

The other man knows better than to argue. He contents himself with a final warning glance at the two, and then he sets to work in that no-nonsense way he no doubt acquired from years of experience on the battlefield dressing his own wounds and others'.

Tony can pinpoint the precise second Rhodey starts picking around inside the wound, because a sheen of moisture springs to life of Peter's eyes and forehead. A full-body flinch rocks him from head to toe. Tony's gaze traces the twitching of the muscle in Peter's jaw as he clenches his teeth against the burn beneath his skin.

Before he knows it, words are flowing out of Tony's mouth, more than he ever predicted would be possible in his state of paralysis at the kid's bedside.

"That's right, that's good, just hold on," he says. He's got the Iron Man gauntlet on over his left hand and Peter has a veritable death grip on him. "You're doing so good. You're brave. Stupid and brave. Real brave. All that shit I said about wringing you out for getting in this situation? I didn't mean it. You know that, buddy. I'm sure you tried to dodge the bullet. It's good. It's gonna be fine. It didn't enter your vital organs, you got your stomach intact for--for--consuming all sorts of god-forsaken Parker creations. I don't care. Have all the Lucky Charms and orange juice and cranberries you want. I literally don't care. You're almost there, bud. Almost there."

"Oh," Peter chokes at a particularly sharp dig from Rhodey's hands. "Oh. Ouch. Mr.--I--" And then the rest of his voice is caught up in a tangle between a gasp and a low, dry sob, and Tony shoves the end of the pillow between his teeth for him to chomp on.

A web of silence squeezes around them all, punctuated only by the last sickening sounds of whatever it is Rhodey has in Peter's leg, and the uneven rise and fall of Peter's chest and the drumbeat of Tony's own heart behind his ribs.

And then finally, _mercifully_ , there's a clink of metal against the counter and a triumphant little grunt from Rhodey, and it's all over.

Peter's head flops back onto the gurney and the edge of the pillowcase slips out from between his teeth. There's only the faintest trickle of blood from the side of his lip where he must have bitten too deeply. Tony reaches forward without thinking to thumb away the bleeding with his free hand.

"Oh, wow. Geez," the kid pants out. "You got a--real soft hand there, Mr. Rhodey. Ugh. Sorry for the--tell Ned...I mean. I'm sorry. And thanks…"

And then right on cue, Peter is out like a light, and Tony and Rhodey are left to stare at one another from across the hospital bed, sagging with relief. Rhodey is the first to recover between the two of them. He lifts first one brow at his best friend, then two, nodding at where Tony's gauntleted hand is imprisoned by Peter's white-knuckled grip.

"Hope your bad knees healed overnight, Tones, because it looks like you'll be there for a while."

**Author's Note:**

> I still can't believe I,,,, actually wrote whump. WHUMP.
> 
> I guess that's what they call growth??
> 
> Any sort of reaction is welcomed with overenthusiastic shrieks and hand flapping. I love you all <3 -kaleb
> 
> Muh tumblr: theoceanismyinkwell  
> Muh insta: kc.barrie


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